Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 1 • Silvia Salvatici
cases, the researchers were unable to address other issues. The fact that
war took centre-stage in their narratives provides yet more evidence of the
depth and intensity of their experience, as studies on war and memory
remind us. On the other hand, this centrality is probably also due to the
importance of this war in the subsequent construction of a Kosovar-
Albanian collective memory.
The more intense the interviewees’ experience of war, the greater had
become the suffering and distress produced in its wake. The past and its
recollection thus become fused with affliction, grief and anguish. In these
cases, the survivors usually believed it best to forget the events that they
considered traumatic, in order to remove their pain and overcome this
trauma. Such was the situation of Besim.
Besim joined the Kosovar Liberation Army (KLA) in early 1993 and lived
in a clandestinely for a long time. During the NATO bombings, he was
captured by the Serbian police and was imprisoned for seven months in
Pozharevc (in the former Republic of Yugoslavia). His narration focused
mainly on the time he was in prison. He considered this period his worst
because he was physically and psychologically mistreated, and because of
the anxiety he felt, deprived of news from his family and of the situation
in Kosovo. Besim’s memory of suffering focused on seemingly trivial
details (noises, objects, and dreams), but he emphasized them because they
brought the past into the present. He remembered:
22
When they closed us in, when they closed those iron doors, it affected my
psyche in a way… because there were 400 rooms there, and that means
that 1,200 times a day… because they brought us food three times a day,
so those doors were opened three times a day – 1,200 times… the sound
was such that a grenade explosion would have hurt my ears less… it’s not
just because they could have come inside to beat someone, but also
because of the doors… those iron knobs. […] The doors in my house are
made out of iron, you know, and every time I hear that noise… but I’m
going to take them off and put wooden ones in their place…
To Besim, removing the noise of his doorknobs became a means of removing
this memory, and thus its suffering. This is the same solution that
Blerta, the girlfriend of a former KLA fighter, chose. In her words:
Blerta: Now he is nervous and sometimes he starts to shout without
any reason and he always remembers something that he has
seen before and he starts to tell me about the things he has
seen before.
Question: Do you think it was a relief to him, telling you what he saw
and confessing his feelings to you?
Blerta: Yes, maybe he needs to talk with somebody and to tell that